


all that I loved

by FeralPen



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 17:57:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15913356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeralPen/pseuds/FeralPen
Summary: A man done me wrong, her grandmother crooned. That wasn't going to happen to Karen. She was going to be smarter than that.





	all that I loved

**Author's Note:**

> Typed spontaneously on my phone last night. Karen Page vs the men in her life.
> 
> Warnings for oblique references to prostitution, porn, drug abuse, and violence.

A man done me wrong.

That's what grandma used to say. She'd croon it as she'd rock back and forth in her creaking chair with her cigarette clamped in between paper thin lips. Her breath wheezed and rattled in her tarred lungs, but her beady old eyes were still razor sharp until her dying day.

A man done me wrong, Karrie, and if you don't watch yourself, one’ll do you just the same.

She hadn't listened. Kids never do. The eternal folly of the ignorance of youth, the certainty that the voices of experience just hadn't tried it right yet. She was young, she was beautiful, she was invincible. That's what she'd thought. She'd been wrong. She was innocent, not invincible, and the men in the world had smelled it on her like a juicy steak in a den of lions. 

She'd loved him. Or she'd thought she had. Later she couldn't say what it was about him she'd loved. Name one quality he had that was exceptional. The memory blurred and faded along with the clatter of needles and the click of camera shutters. In the night she could still remember the feeling of his hands on her skin, bruising and pinching and caressing by turns. She thought she loved him.

She had barely turned eighteen when she killed him.

They never proved it wasn't a suicide. Nobody came forward. Her alibi was shaky, but circumstantial evidence wasn't enough for a conviction. Her grandmother's breath wheezed and rattled when they staged the crime scene together, but her canny, sun-bleached eyes understood. 

“I'm nobody's whore,” Karen swore.

It was a bold statement. Untrue. Faceless men with money for drugs knew better. Faceless men behind computer screens had her pictures. A dead man had the last remnants of the bright young girl from Before.

“A man did you wrong,” her grandma said, and that was that.

Once her grandmother died, she left. Vermont was an echoing, empty space with nothing but graves and an ancient house stained yellow with tar to hold her there. She walked with her suitcase in her scuffed sneakers to the bus station. Flipped a coin. Heads east, tails west.

The shiny profile of George Washington decided. East coast it was. She boarded the next bus out of the state, decided to escape into a city full of millions and millions of lost souls just like her.

Funny how a city full of people could feel so empty.

Funnier, still, that it took another man's death to shoot her forward again.

And for a brief, shining moment, Nelson & Murdock was the happiest time of her life.

She loved them both so much. The warmth between them, the rapport. She fell easily into it, a trio united against everything. They could do anything. She ignored her gut, ignored the portents of doom on the horizon. She was happy - so perfectly happy.

She loved Foggy first, and wished later that she had loved him more. He was a good man. A true friend. He didn't push, didn't ask her for more than she could give. He could have loved her. It would have been a good life, she thought. She could have come home to Foggy and his stories and his warmth, and maybe for a time it could have worked.

Foggy wasn't like her, though. She couldn't imagine looking in his eyes and telling him the truth. She saw it in her mind. That look of dawning horror, how he would try to joke, to laugh, how his face would change from one moment to the next from shock to fear, disgust, how he would try to understand her and ultimately find himself lacking. How could he understand? Foggy who was kind and brave and good? How could he understand a woman who'd killed not once, but twice? Who would kill again if she had to?

No, Foggy wasn't meant for these things.

She loved Matt the most. It was funny, because of the men she loved, she knew the least about him. He was an animal like her, and like her something had been broken in him. She wondered when it had happened, from what little she knew of him. When he lost his eyes? His father? Had someone before then hurt him? Someone after? Or had he been born this way, ruthless and cunning and cruel, ready to tear out with bloody teeth anything he couldn't control?

She didn't think he tried to be a bad man. Learning later that he was who he was, she figured he tried very hard to be a good man. The penitential austerity of his means, his tireless slog of pro bono cases, the fraying hems of his suits and hoarse little pleas for forgiveness… he tried to make up for it. God knew he tried, but somewhere along the way, he lost his gentleness. Some decisive, mean spirit in him…

Karen couldn't be the beautiful and faithful doll he needed. Her splintered edges and his made beautiful mosaics, but where was the future?

Buried under Midland Circle.

It sent her spinning. She rolled with the spin, tumbled into a run. She threw herself into her work. She was respected. Feared, in some way. She loved it. Deep down, she reveled in it. More than some dumb girl caught up in things too big and scary for her. The clack of her heels and the click of her pen were all the power she needed in this world. 

The .38 in her purse she saved for the other, uglier worlds.

She was still a dumb girl at heart.

Frank Castle was everything she didn't need. He was Matt’s anger, his rage and ambition and cold violence. He was Foggy’s pragmatism and distance. He was a world beyond her world, one of pain and passion and dark torments. He was an enigma wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in sweaty Kevlar. 

He was the first man who had ever seen her.

She felt it in her soul when he looked at her. His eyes looked into her own and she knew that he knew. Knew that he saw the animal caged inside, had felt the rage and helplessness and terror and come out on the other side of it just as she had. Two sides of one bloodstained coin. Heads Karen Page, tails Frank Castle. She clutched the coin in her palm. Too scared to flip.

Like a dumb girl, she kept coming back. Over and over again, every opportunity he gave her to walk away. She followed him right back into hell over and over again, because maybe this was what love was. Or maybe if she could save Frank, she could save herself. She tried not to analyze it. 

Of all the men she'd loved, maybe Frank was the truest. 

More than anyone. Truer than anyone. The one man she might be able to save before his own demons ripped him to pieces.

After everything, after everything… she sat at home with her pot of flowers in the window and poured out shot after shot until the world spun with a blurry haze and she could forget for just a little while how much Frank Castle made her ache. The flowers sat in her window day after day, but Frank never came.

Maybe by saving him, she lost him. 

Maybe losing him was better.

She visited Matt’s church, lit a candle for his soul, for Frank's, for hers, for the man who ruined her before she was eighteen, for her grandmother, for Foggy. Her cluster of candles and the dollars she stuffed in the box did nothing for the hollow ache in her heart. She let herself break for one moment, one trailing tear to quiver at the point of her chin before is shivered itself off and landed with a plop on her coat. Then she pulled a tissue from her purse, blotted her face dry, and walked away.

A man done me wrong.

Karen Page smoothed her hair and tightened her hold on her purse. She was alone.

She was better off alone.

With her heels clacking and her hand inches away from the gun in her purse, she melted into the city of millions and millions of lost souls just like her.


End file.
